Short Circuits
by inkydoo
Summary: One shots. Short in nature. Read and Review.
1. Heal

Hey everybody. This doesn't have anything to do with Trigun...but it does have something to do with cyborgs! I totally haven't forgotten about TLSG, either. I've just been...under-productive when it comes to that story. It'll get finished!

This takes place during 2.02 as John walks between the church and school.

* * *

He didn't want to deal with anybody. He didn't want to talk to his mom, his uncle, and least of all, her. Before he left for school, he saw her pull the last staple out of her face. She was healing. She healed a lot faster than he did.

She hadn't mentioned anything about what she had said. She hadn't told him why she had lied or that she was sorry she had lied or if she had even lied at all. The only thing she said to him was that he couldn't be trusted.

He...couldn't be...trusted. After what he had gone through to bring her back: cleaning her chip the best he could, thinking about what she said over and over again, agonizing about what it would be like to lose her, realizing that he needed her to be there, knowing that he would be betraying his mom, his uncle, and possibly the human race just because he needed to know.

The only thing that made him feel slightly better about the situation was that he hadn't said it back to her. He hadn't confirmed that what she said was true. But did he have to? Just by touching him, she could run a test, check his heartbeat, monitor fluctuations in his body, maybe even in his brain.

Run a test. He wished she could run a test on him and make everything perfect.

Now he didn't even know why he had brought her back. _He_ couldn't be trusted. What did that even mean? Did it mean she couldn't trust him? Or did it just mean that his actions couldn't be calculated and predicted by an algorithm anymore? Wasn't that evidence enough for him to stop treating her like a human and start dealing with her like a machine? She was basically admitting that she didn't understand why he brought her back. If she had really known...if she had really thought he...felt that way...then she should _know_ why he brought her back!

He saw all the kids walking through the halls. He thought about what it would be like to have no clue what the future stored for him. He thought about what it would be like to have a normal family. He would have settled for a normal single mom. Hell, he would have settled for simply not knowing that from this point, things were only going to get worse.

None of these people at this school could understand. None of them had even an inkling of what was in store for them. In just four years, everything would be different. He couldn't talk to anyone. The only..._person_...he thought he had...well. He had been stupid anyway.

She...

It...

She...

He didn't know what to think anymore. He slammed his locker, realizing that things would never be the same again.

Yeah, she certainly did heal a lot faster than him.


	2. She remembered

Thanks Allara, novageek, Lizzie Lyra, and starphoenixfliesfree for the reviews, alerts, and favs!

This one is from Sarah's POV as she contemplates the events of 2.01, 2.02, and some of the stuff that happened in T2

* * *

She remembered the times when he would slink around the room, holding back affection for fear of getting yelled at. Sometimes he still did and she hated herself for it. Too much time around military types, her asshole ex-boyfriends, and a mother bent on raising a world leader had led to this. It didn't break him. It only made him hide that sensitive part of himself under layers of sarcasm and teenage angst. To an outsider, he might even seem to be on the course of normal adolescent development. They couldn't tell by looking at him how much time he spent learning about ballistics and military strategies, how many years he had spent in guerrilla camps learning to survive, how the only stable things in his life were machines, terminators, the very things he was destined to fight.

She knew it was natural for humans to get attached to things. When they were in Nicaragua, she tried different things. He had a pet for a while. He loved that dog. A guerrilla soldier slit its throat prior to an ambush attack on their camp. It didn't make him hard or cynical. It just made him sad and lonely. She couldn't console him the right way, the way he needed. Her only mission was to adequately prepare the future savior of mankind. She told him that they were alive and being alive should be enough. It wasn't enough, but he stopped crying and at the time, that's what she thought was important.

He once told her that the only good thing about having foster parents was that he didn't have to worry about his dog getting killed. That stung. It took her years to learn how to be a real mom, not the mom who would raise a one-day military expert, but the kind of mom he needed right then and there. She might have been as hard as nuclear nails, but she tried to let a little maternal softness seep through for him.

Yesterday made her realize that she might not be doing as good a job as she had hoped.

She remembered watching him struggle with the decision to "kill" the only real friend he had made in years. She couldn't believe her ears. That machine told him it loved him. And the truly disturbing part to her, not as a human who would have to face those things in the future, but as the mother of a young man, was that she could tell he wanted it to be true.

She did the best she could to console him. She told him that he might be able to fix it, but that she couldn't risk it. She told him that it was lying to him. She told him it was trying to trick him, that machines always went bad...eventually. He sat there quietly contemplating its chip and went through the motions of agreement, "I know, mom." She could tell by the sound of his voice that he was doing everything he could to get her to stop talking, that he wasn't convinced, that he didn't want to hear her. She could tell that he was thinking about the last terminator he had to say goodbye to. She remembered how he ran up to it and hugged it. She remembered how it hugged him back. She remembered feeling horrible that this machine knew what her son needed and she didn't.

They got the machine to the junkyard. The two men had to carry its body to a broken down car. He just stood and watched, gently fingering its processor chip, the only truly unique part of it. She couldn't tell who he was more mad at: her for making him do this, or the machine for making him think about what it had said. He stood apart from everybody else and waited for the last moment. He got in the car with it and he looked so sad. He looked at the terminator and rubbed it's knuckles with his hand. She thought this would be one of those moments where he would hate her for a long time, but eventually he would understand. The next moment was a blur. Before she knew it, he had shoved the processor back into the machine and pulled a gun on her. He pulled a gun on her, his own mother. He was treating her like she was the enemy as he was allowing a terminator to reboot, a terminator who was programmed to kill him.

And then he handed it the gun and the whole world seemed like it was about to end.

But it didn't. He had been right, and somehow the machine righted itself. He helped it out of the car and glared at her as he lit the flair. She felt like she had completely lost him.

She tried to apologize, but she didn't feel like she had done a very good job. That night she couldn't sleep, making sure the terminator didn't come too close to him in the middle of the night. She thought about a machine that contemplated the resurrection and redemption, a machine she couldn't trust.

But the biggest blow didn't come until morning.

The terminator had just finished telling her that in the case of a malfunction in the future, not to let him bring it back. She thought about the futility of keeping him from trying, but she agreed. Just then, he walked in and the machine walked away from her. It told him how he couldn't be trusted, that he had made a bad decision, that he should have thought about his own survival instead of its.

It made her think of the time he came back with "Uncle Bob" to rescue her from the mental institution. He came back to save her because he knew she would otherwise be killed. He came back because he loved her, and what had she done? She told him that he was stupid for coming back. She told him it was a bad decision, that he should have thought about his own survival instead of hers.

He had started crying and she didn't even notice. Her brain was wired, thinking about everything that had happened that day. She was probably still being affected by the psychotropic drugs she had been forced to take for months. Nothing excused the fact, however, that a machine noticed her son's pain and she didn't.

She didn't want to think of the things she was thinking. She didn't want to contemplate how much she had learned from that terminator. She didn't want to think about how she was the same, how the only person in this little group that was truly human was John.

She didn't want to think about how this would affect the future. She didn't want to think about the savior of humanity being attached to things. She didn't want to think about the fact that in his life, he already loved two of these machines.

She tried to block all of this out of her mind as she told him to go to school. Maybe being around some normal humans would be good for him today.


End file.
